I have been looking around for a way to password-protect a USB flash drive which ALWAYS remains plugged into my computer - - it NEVER goes anywhere. It seems that every product I've looked at on-line involves a lot of complicated encryption protocols, and would take Albert Einstein to figure it all out! :O

Among a couple of the products I have reviewed include Truecrypt, Axcrypt, etc. The instruction pages for Truecrypt alone is 12 pages long! That is just outright absurd in my opinion! All I need is a USB flash drive that I can simply place a password on, so no one but someone with the password can access ANY of the folders & files on it.

I would appreciate any suggestions in this regard! Thank you for your time and review!

Truecrypt is very simple.
You can't encrypt existing data. You have to start by turning your flashdrive into an encrypted container, then you can mount it and copy data into it. Nobody will ever be able to read a thing on the drive until you run TC and mount the drive using your password.
Just install it, run it and follow the instructions for creating a container. It's all very logical and easy to follow.

If you're on Windows and you want simple I recommend a U3 drive if you can find one (I'm not sure if they're still producing them). I had a Sandisk Cruzer w/ U3 2-3 years ago and its fairly easy to put a password on them. The drawback is you can only access what you have on the drive on a Windows system.

I did manage to locate a Corsair 8 GB USB flash drive on the Newegg site which appears to be just the item I need! No fancy, lengthy, encryption stuff...just being able to lock and unlock it with a password.

The one question I DO have is this: Once I have the Corsair flash drive, is all I need do is just copy/move all the files/folders from my current unsecured drive onto it?

Yes. The U3 drive has a virtual CD-rom partition that it stores its software on that automatically runs when you insert it. The U3 software lives in your system tray. All you haft to do is go into the settings from the menu and input a password. The U3 menu is also handy if you're storing portable applications on the drive. After that's done, any time you take out the drive and re-insert it, the first thing you see is a login U3 prompt. Enter the password correctly, and the drive containing your data is mounted.

Truecrypt is very simple.
You can't encrypt existing data. You have to start by turning your flashdrive into an encrypted container, then you can mount it and copy data into it. Nobody will ever be able to read a thing on the drive until you run TC and mount the drive using your password.
Just install it, run it and follow the instructions for creating a container. It's all very logical and easy to follow.